Mark Steyn is a must read all the time:

Oh, well. In Hollywood, purveyors of despised American culture to the world's cretins, they at least wait a decade before following Dumb And Dumber with Dumb And Dumberer. Jenkins held off barely a month before filing his own Dumb And Dumberer, in which he predicted that 2003 would go down in history as the year of "the destruction of the greatest treasure from the oldest age of Western civilisation, the greatest heritage catastrophe since the Second World War". This was a reference to the alleged destruction of the Iraqi National Museum, which yours truly said at the time was this year's "Jenin massacre" - that's to say, a complete fiction. And so it proved.

Seven months ago, there was so much hooey in the papers about Iraq that I decided to see for myself and had a grand time motoring round the Sunni Triangle. Lovely place, friendly people, property very reasonable. Why were my impressions so different from the doom-mongers at CNN or the New York Times? Well, it seems most media types holed up at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad are still using their old Ba'athist minders as translators when they venture out. That would, at the very minimum, tend to give one a somewhat skewed perspective of the new Iraq.

Ha.